- The Apple
People drank the apples John “Appleseed” Chapman planted during his Ohio migration
to Marietta by catamaran his scattered orchards slated to be hatcheted in the name of Prohibition
before the Women’s Christian Temperance Union repositioned the Hard Cider Nation, traded
knock-down drag outs for blossom-punched pie safes. Cure-alls, they called them, rewriting the story
of the vegetarian eccentric who once punished his footfor squashing a worm by throwing away his shoe,
wintered in a carved-out sycamore outside Defiance likened his ways to a bumblebee’s,
lashed a side car of moss-cloaked seeds to his hollowed hickory canoe—
Malus domestica from Malus sieversii, wild sour fruit from the Old World
botanists have traced to Kazakhstan— died wearing a coffee sack leaving a 1,200 acre estate,
snake root and joe pye weed trail sentries, first waft of seasonal shift in the swamp gas, death [End Page 52]
come to the luna moth he woke to find on his chest, silk-soft dust of her scales under fingertips and himself
bathing in Little Soddy Creek losing his matte finish of pollen drift a bobcat-stalked piss, nubby crow’s feet
carpet in which he washed apple-fleck-sized spears from prickled hands looking
into a night sky stars not white but red, green-white fleabane-colored, yellow
at the center with lavender edges if he kept his open eyes fixed on nothing, his dust body wet. [End Page 53]
Amy Wright is the nonfiction editor of Zone 3 Press, and the author of four chapbooks. Her work can also be found in Bellingham Review, Brevity, Drunken Boat, Quarterly West, Southern Poetry Anthology (Volumes III and VI), and Tupelo Quarterly. She teaches at Austin Peay State University and resides in Tennessee, whose beautiful, defensible waterways help her current project, Creeks of the Upper South, written in collaboration with William Wright.